Princeton woman compiles her parents' WWII love letters into book

PRINCETON — Shortly after her mother succumbed to a long battle with multiple sclerosis in 1995, Terri Halbreich David’s father approached her with a bulging black trash bag.

He handed it over to her, saying nothing of what was inside, she said.

“He just said, ‘Here’,” David recalled last week. “I looked inside and there were all of these letters.”

Inside the red, white and blue-edged envelopes, postmarked with six-cent air mail stamps and embossed with airplanes, were 600 letters between her father and mother during World War II. Her father, Navy veteran and dentist Lester Halbriech, was stationed for 18 months on a troop transport ship during various South Pacific tours.

“I couldn’t bring myself to look at them. All I did was arrange them chronologically,” she said.

The exchange was the last they spoke of the letters. She never asked anything more about them of her father, who died five years later in 2000. It was only four years ago that David, a retired psychologist, started to read and marvel at them.

“They were so different, so lyrical and beautiful,” she said.

Her father never talked much about the war, she said, offering just a few snippets here and there, bits about his nuisance of a superior officer and his bunkmate on the U.S.S. Oxford.

In the letters she found so much more, she said. From time to time his ship passed through war zones with fresh destruction, which he relayed home once the censors gave the go-ahead. During the invasion of Okinawa, he stayed on board, but wrote her what he saw.

“Fires were burning everywhere and the sky was clouded with smoke,” he wrote in a letter dated April 5, 1945. “At frequent intervals both in time and space a star shell would be sent up, its brilliant dead whiteness lighting up the area over which it hung.”

Brutality and beauty

In the letters to his young wife, Lester Halbreich also described moments of beauty he had found, and a showed a love of nature.

“Yesterday, while standing on the fo’castle, I saw a couple of schools of flying fish,” he wrote in October 1944. “At first glance I was really amazed. I knew how far we were from land, and here were these swallow-like creatures skimming the waves. A moment after, the sun shone on them from the right angle and lighted up their brilliant blue iridescence, and the filmy, gossamer-like fins. I could see them for the fish they were.”

Until he handed them to her nearly 50 years later, David had no idea such letters even existed, she said.

As she delved deeper and deeper, she realized she had to do something with her parents’ wartime letters. After four years of organizing, editing and finding a narrative strand, she recently self-published a book, “Mail Call,” that chronicled their correspondence.

Few of the letters actually dealt with the battlefield, or the aftermath of the violent fighting in the Pacific Theater of Operatons, thanks to censorship and military advisories that prevented the boys abroad from letting their beaus at home know their exact location and future movements.

Rather, Lester Halbreich’s letters brimmed with detailed, poetic observations about daily life aboard a ship, along with longing to see his wife, whom he had married three weeks after Pearl Harbor.

“I know that I’ve told you this a thousand or more times, but it bears repetition. I love you, my darling, with all my heart and with all my soul and with all my might,” a letter from August 1944 said. “As I sit here typing this, I have both your pictures in front of me, and my heart goes out to you in the deepest of passion, and I could die of unrequited love because you are not here with me.”

Transported to the past

Lester and Shirley Halbreich married when he was 24 and she 18, their daughter said. He grew up in a Russian-Jewish family and lived for several years on Hamilton Avenue in Trenton before moving to New York City. She grew up in a wealthier family that vacationed in the Catskill Mountains.

They met when he was waiting tables and serving the family during their summer vacation to the mountains. His impatience with her led to their first contact, David said.

“She didn’t want to drink her milk and my father told her, ‘If you hurry up and drink your milk, we can play tennis this afternoon,’” David said.

They did play tennis, and married a few months later on Christmas Eve.

David said she didn’t know much about her parents' relationship during the war. They never talked about it.

Reading their letters, typed or handwritten on smooth onion paper, she was transported back to that time, she said. She pictured her dad, cramped on a ship rising and falling atop the rolling waves, and her mom, living in an apartment block in New York City populated mostly by war wives.

“For awhile I felt like I was living my parents’ lives,” David said. “It was hard when it ended. I had to rejoin the current world.”

It struck her how they wrote to each other in such a poignant way. The art of letter-writing has since been lost, she said.

The effect of long delay between letters, the anxiety and longing in each correspondence, were unfathomable, she said. Issues were not resolved in a matter of seconds, via chat or text; it took days or weeks.

A brighter future

Her father didn’t see much direct action, she said. He mainly stayed on board, doing dental work on the injured. Her mother was home, constantly worrying about her love abroad. She ferried back letters of love and news of the war, home life and their newborn son.

She also wrote her husband after Adolf Hitler’s death, heralding the beginning to the end of the war.

“No, his death doesn’t leave me satisfied but rather frustrated. He’s escaped too easily,” she said in a letter dated May 1, 1945. “If only I believed in after-world retribution, how easily I could see him sizzling in Hell for all eternity. The misery he wrought in the last decade can never be undone.

“The events of the last few days have been breathtaking in their rapidity. Truly, we are witnessing in this week alone, the end of a ghastly era. I pray a new one will dawn much brighter,” she wrote.

It was not until the war began to wind down that they began in their letters to dream about their future, and to slowly shape the life that eventually included David.

In the last letter, dated Oct. 29, 1945, her father was filled with ideas about what came next: perhaps a move to South America, or at least a trip there. Eventually they settled in New York City, where they remained until their later years, happily married for 54 years.

“And that, my darling wife, brings us up to today, a day nearer home,” he wrote in one of his final war letters, dated Feb. 8, 1945. “A day when these thin schemes of mine and yours can be turned into reality; and above all, a day when we two shall be one more together again.”